When Parasite scooped the best picture Oscar in 2019, it catapulted viewers over the 1-inch subtitle barrier right into a treasure trove of South Korean cinema.
In 2020, one other immaculate South Korean movie joined that glowing pile: The Call. Released on Netflix, The Call shares the identical Oscar-nominated editor as Parasite: Yang Jin-mo. If you are keen on environment friendly, distinctive storytelling wrought with suspense, you possibly can’t afford to overlook it.
Oh Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo) is a pressure to be reckoned with.
Netflix
The Call is ready in rural Korea, the place 28-year-old Kim Seo-yeon makes the journey dwelling to go to her estranged, sick mom. Crucially, she loses her telephone on the practice journey over. This deadly error sees her pressured to make use of a cordless telephone. After one fateful telephone name, a real nightmare unfurls.
Seo-yeon interacts with one other 28-year-old girl — Oh Young-sook — who cries for assist from her personal “loopy” mom. The trailer-advertised reveal: Both ladies are in the identical home, however from completely different occasions. One is in 2019, the opposite in 1999. Cue superior ’90s Korean grunge music.
With this unusual connection, Seo-yeon within the current timeline is enticed to tinker with the unlucky occasions in her previous. The solely catch is that this depends on her friendship with the opposite girl on the road, whose circumstances may be way more hellish than her personal.
The truth these ladies work together with out assembly head to head reveals the profound ability of actresses Park Shin-hye and Jeon Jong-seo. They embark on a cat-and-mouse tug of warfare, tiptoeing throughout a minefield of unknowns and potential threats. The stress is unrelenting.
The ensemble is rounded out by the ladies’s moms, performed by the equally extraordinary Kim Sung-ryung and Lee El. Lee El specifically produces the form of unhinged mother or father efficiency that haunted youngsters like Carrie, Coraline and Norman Bates.
Every facet of the filmmaking course of has clearly been siphoned via a fragile sieve. The consideration to element is immaculate. As nicely as editor Yang Jin-mo, the filmmaking crew contains Avengers: The Age of Ultron and The Great Gatsby colorist Vanessa Taylor. You’ll discover a purple hue sheathing the scenes with Seo-yeon within the current timeline, representing her disappointment and despair. In the previous, Young-sook’s scenes glint with pink, refracting anger, hazard and violence.
The stress you are feeling as the sport performs out is testomony to how deeply The Call attracts you in. Yes, it presents a high-concept time journey mind-melder, nevertheless it’s all propped up by the pillars of the mother-daughter relationships. Oh, and there is a lesson in there someplace in regards to the value of adjusting your destiny, however fortunately this is not thrown with a splat in your face.
Like a Bong Joon-ho movie, right here director and author Lee Chung-hyun drops a surprising halfway twist that adjustments all the pieces you already know in regards to the enjoying area. It all wraps up in an emotionally satisfying ending earlier than squeezing out one final heart-clunking shock.
The Call is verdant, creative, subtle storytelling that leaves you buzzing for the form of top-notch movies that do not usually discover their method onto Netflix. Dislodge it from the again of Netflix’s streaming cabinets ASAP.
